Headlights.
Down the lane on the left, coming toward her.
Jumping up to her feet, she ran for the car or truck or SUV, streaking out into the road, facing off, thinking of how Jim had gotten hurt. She wanted to feel the impact, wanted to be solid enough to sustain the strike, to have at least one of the old rules of life apply to her: Don’t play in traffic because you will get hit.
“Sissy! Shit!”
“See me!” she screamed at the approaching lights. “See me!”
“Sissy, goddamn it!”
Her prayers were answered for once. Just when she thought she’d be denied, the car’s horn blared loud enough to get through the fury that was driving her. Then she had a brief impression of the driver looking right at her in terror, some inside light in the sedan illuminating his pale face with eyes stretched wide and a mouth open as if he were yelling—
She was bodily removed from the path, a far greater weight muscling her out of the way as brakes squealed and the world spun.
She landed on the grass strip on the far side of the road, her savior’s body crushing her, pain both clearing her head and scrambling it in a different way. Instantly, she was spun onto her back, her arms pinned over her head, her legs trapped in between two heavy thighs.
Above her, Jim looked as pissed off as she felt—
“Where did she go?”
Dimly, she turned her head. A man was getting out of the BMW that had almost hit her and looking around frantically. “She was right there in the middle of the road.”
A woman emerged from the other side of the sedan. “I saw her, too. She came out of nowhere.”
Just like that cat, Sissy thought numbly as her anger dissipated. The one that had jumped in front of Jim’s truck earlier.
“I’m over here,” she called out weakly. “God … I’m over here…”
The two of them focused in her direction. “Did you hear that?” the man asked.
“Hear what?” the woman said.
The man approached, but it was clear he couldn’t really see her anymore. And as she opened her mouth to yell again, Jim clamped his hand on her mouth, silencing her.
“Don’t you think we have enough problems,” he hissed.
She tried to fight against him, but without her fury, there was no contest: He was way stronger, and stilled her without any real effort. And as expected, shortly thereafter, the couple got back in their luxury car and drove off.
As their red taillights flared, her frustration rekindled.
This was it? After all the good deeds she’d done in her life, after everything she’d unfairly been through down below, her eternity was getting stuck in the halfway-house version of an afterlife? Neither here nor there, Heaven nor Hell—nothing but a shadow that could take shape on rare occasions and maybe make car drivers hit their brakes in passing?
Fucking bullshit.
“I’m going to let you up,” Jim said. “Okay?”
Sissy nodded and waited for him to pull back, giving him all the time in the world to misjudge how calm she was … and when he finally did—
She went back at him, flailing with her fists and kicking with her legs until the pair of them were rolling around on the sidewalk, the concrete scratching her forearms, her calves, her cheeks. She didn’t care—she was crazed again, her fire finding another corner of her emotions that had yet to be immolated.
And maybe Jim knew that. Because instead of sitting on her again, he let her go while still controlling her, fending off her attack with moves so practiced, it was as if he anticipated her strikes before she even thought of them.
Which naturally just pissed her off even more.
Eventually, even though she felt at her core that she could go on for ages, she ran out of gas, her body getting sloppy, her strength ebbing: The anger didn’t disappear; there was just no more physical energy left to provide an outlet for it—
Sissy ended up collapsing against his chest, breathing in ragged bursts, unable to lift her head, much less her fists.
Closing her eyes, she cursed long and hard inside her head … because, God knew, she still couldn’t get enough air down into her lungs.
When she finally found her voice, she said hoarsely, “Why me…”
And then abruptly, she shoved herself away from him. “And why do you care so much about me—I don’t know you—”
“Sissy, look, I know you’ve been through a lot—”
“Just leave me alone, okay? If I want to get hit by a car, let me do it—”
“Sorry, but I can’t.”
“Then actually help me! Tell me where I am—”
“I wish I could—”
“Whatever,” she derided. “You want to keep your day job as an angel? There’re another two hundred and fifty million people in this country—go save them. But as of this moment, I’m not your problem, and you are not mine.”
Getting to her feet and brushing herself off, Sissy stared into the street and felt cheated. But at least they had seen her; they really had—
A rough hand clamped onto her arm and snapped her around.
Her savior didn’t look like anything close to a saint. His eyes were narrowed into slits, his upper lip had curled off his teeth, and the rage radiating out of him was probably the only thing that could have gotten through to her.
His voice, when he spoke, was a snarl. “I saw you dead, how ’bout that. I broke through a door and found you bled the fuck out. I was too late to save you then, so call me stupid for trying to do right by you now.” He stuck his finger in her face. “You want to get all frustrated and shit because you don’t know who you are? Fine. But don’t burn down my fucking house, and don’t resent me because I don’t fucking know what your deal is.” He jabbed his finger at his own chest. “You think I know myself in this mess? I don’t. I don’t have a goddamn clue about so much of it all. Jesus Christ.”
With that, he was the one who spun off and went back for the house, all the while dragging that injured leg behind him like it hurt like hell.
How he was walking on that cast, she had no idea…
As she watched him go back across the road, she regretted the whole evening. And yet even as she calmed down, under her surface … the anger was still there, simmering along.
To think she’d assumed that Hell would be the worst thing that happened to her.
This … seemed so much harder.
Chapter
Twenty-two
Jim locked himself in his bedroom. And it wasn’t because he was sulking.
He didn’t trust himself at the moment. He was beat to shit, partially starved, and angry as hell—not exactly a trifecta of healthy relating.
Rifling through his stuff, he found, through the grace of God, a pack of unopened Marlboros in his winter parka. As he lit one up and sat down on his bed, he ran through what he was going to need to cut the cast off his leg. Some kind of saw?
Underneath the plaster or whatever the hell it was, he knew damn well the bone was probably still broken, but similar to the way the scratches on the backs of his hands were healing in front of his eyes, the leg had to be doing the same. Guess it made sense. What kind of savior would he be if he was sidelined by injury?
Wonder if he cut off his arm, would it grow back?
Exhaling, he watched the smoke curl up toward the ceiling. Then he put the cig in between his teeth and went for his crystal knife—the one he had left. ’Cuz the other was in the cab of his truck—or in the CPD’s evidence room, more likely.
The weapon was as beautiful as it was deadly, the ultimate lights-out switch for minions and harpies alike—two subspecies of demon he had had the joy of coming into contact with lately. It was also handy-dandy when it came to exorcisms, as he’d learned in the first round.